Dear Almost-Teenage Boy

So, you’re a teenager! Well, more or less. It’s a scary time, but I hope mostly an exciting time. It’s around about now that you’re going to have to start thinking for yourself, which really ties the exciting and the scary up in a great big knot and gives it to you to unravel.

So now I’m going to talk to you about sex. I won’t pretend you don’t know what it is. Don’t be embarrassed. (But you may not want to read this with your parents looking over your shoulder.) One day, when you’re 17, or 20, or 35, or 80, you might want to have sex with a woman, or a man, or both, or neither (and it’s all ok, as long as the other person is ok with it too).

And especially when it comes to sex, you’re going to hear and see a lot of things about what should and shouldn’t be allowed, and this is where thinking for yourself really starts to matter. I can’t tell you what’s right and what’s wrong. A lot of people are going to try to do that. A lot of people are going to tell you that sex is bad, or that who someone has sex with is bad, or that how someone dresses is bad. I don’t think any of that is true, but that’s not what I want to talk about right now.

One thing that a lot of people, important people, are going to tell you is bad, is abortion. You probably already know what that is: it’s when someone ends a pregnancy on purpose. There are a lot of reasons that someone might want to do this, and it’s not for you or me to say if those reasons are good or not. And there are a lot of reasons that some people think it shouldn’t be allowed. Those people might say it’s murder. I don’t think it is. But I can’t tell you what to think. All I can tell you is what I think.

I think that no one should have to be pregnant if they don’t want to be. I think that having an abortion is not the same as killing a baby. I think that no one should tell girls what to do with their bodies. I think that every child that’s born should be wanted and loved, not born because someone told a girl she had to have a baby.

So that’s what I think.

Maybe you don’t have to think about this right now. That’s fine. But this is a question that, one day, people are going to try to tell you the answer to. The more you think about it for yourself, the more you’ll be able to decide if their answer is a good one or not. But when you do think about it, there’s just one thing I want you to consider.

This is all I ask: treat girls like people.

Treat everyone like people, but right now, I especially want to focus on girls. It sounds obvious, right? But there are a lot of people who want to treat women like they’re things. A lot of people want to tell women what to do. When you have to think about big questions like this, remember that every girl is someone’s daughter, or sister, or mother, or best friend. If someone’s telling you that girls are less important than boys, or shouldn’t be allowed to do the same things that boys are, then I hope that you will think very hard about what they’re saying. Don’t think that someone has to be right just because they’re a grown up.

Don’t believe everything people say. Ask questions. And if the answer to your first question is “Because God says so,” or “Because we’ve always done it that way,” or “Because it just is,” then ask more questions. I spent my teenage years accepting the easy answers because I thought that people who were older than me or seemed to know more than me always had to be right, and I believed a lot of stupid things because of that.

Trust yourself – but know that sometimes you’ll be wrong. And don’t be afraid to tell people when they’re wrong, especially when you think the things they’re saying might hurt other people. If you can, do this graciously and politely. I hope you’re better at that than I am.

Read books. Read books about boys and girls, and boys who like girls, and girls who like girls, and people who start out as boys but end up as girls, and everything else in between. Remember that people want different things. Some boys like to wear pink. Some girls like to kiss girls. And that’s ok. Everyone’s different.

There’s a quote by Walt Whitman on my fridge at home, which says “re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.” I wish I’d done that when I was your age. I hope you’ll do it much more. When I got answers that insulted my own soul, I should have asked more questions. Ask questions until you’re blue in the face. (Then breathe.)

I don’t want you to be a great man. Instead, I hope with all my heart that you will be a great human being. Be good to other humans. Treat them with respect. The world is not a very safe place for a lot of people right now, especially girls. Boys like you can grow up to be the human beings who make the world safer for other human beings. Never let anyone tell you that you can’t change the world. You can. You can make it better.

This is a particularly potent formula for young teenagers. The bait is telling them that the World and Authority has Opinions, but they should Make Up Their Own Mind (because They Know Better). Which child doesn’t like to hear that? Then comes the hook: the gentle segue into your own opinion, implying not-so-subtly that anyone who holds a contrary opinion might just be an Agent For The Man, and probably hasn’t thought this out, and if the reader finds himself agreeing in any way with The Man… why, more research is required.

Done right – and this piece is written near-perfectly – you can have the kid thinking exactly what you want, and (even better) believing that everyone with a contrary opinion must be ignorant, malicious, or both. Works almost every time.

Ok, so the boy should not believe in any social ‘myths’ except those of the writer? I am 100% all for gender equality but I will never understand abortion and would not want to teach my son (hes 1 year now) that it is ok to have sex and then not own up to the consequences. Maybe its cultural differences, maybe I’m narrow minded – but Im wondering who is thinking about the child? You know, the innocent one who has no fault? Or are we not suppossed to treat him as a person until he is born?

It is good to have differing opinions and the freedom to express them. I would like to say that I am a proud feminist who is anti anti abortion.

If everything was all up to me, I would adopt all these unwanted pregnancies, pregnancies from one night stands, date rapes, incest and all. I would mother all these children and give them all the love they need.

But the world is not perfect and I dont have all the resources.

My mother taught me that life begins at conception and I believe her, I will teach that to my son. Because while everyone is talking about the woman and her body, nobody is thinking about the child.

To me, this is just another way that we are showing we are a society that tramples upon the rights of the weak and disadvantaged. Men trample upon us and we in turn trample upon our children. When does this all END!

Alison, this is a really heartwarming piece. The sentiment is very, very admirable and I respect you for writing it. Well done.

However, I have one gripe.

> There are a lot of reasons that someone might want to do this, and it’s not
> for you or me to say if those reasons are good or not.

“This” meaning abortion.

Frankly, that’s bullshit. Because, O Righteous Fellow Human, for whom *is* it to say that those reasons are good or not? Who’s gonna judge? Cos if no-one judges, we’ll all just sit here in a pile of feel-good nonjudgmentalism, and won’t that be fun and warm and fuzzy? We’ll have a quiet picnic and silently allow all kinds of wrongs and passively forbid all kinds of innocent freedoms. We’ll comfortably STFU about tricksy moral questions like abortion, especially if they’re really sensitive and we might tread on someone’s precious pregnant toes.

Fuck that shit. There are lots of reasons someone might want to have an abortion. Many of them are just fine and some of them are straight-up wrong, and it’s up to us to figure out which is which and when and why.